It’s been a tough year for Quebec City’s Les Violons du Roy. Last spring, the group, which plays period music on modern instruments, announced that founding music director Bernard Labadie was taking time off for health reasons. By the summer, fans had learned that Labadie was seriously ill with lymphoma and would be sitting out the entire 2014-15 season.

The unexpected death in September of beloved English Baroque specialist Christopher Hogwood was another blow — Hogwood had been scheduled to guest conduct two concerts in Quebec City in February 2015.

The orchestra has soldiered on admirably in Labadie’s absence thanks to several trusted guest conductors and, chiefly, its hardworking associate conductor, Mathieu Lussier.

Lussier is a classical triple threat: In addition to conducting, he is a sought-after composer and a virtuoso player of both the Baroque and the modern bassoon. It’s not clear if Lussier is actually left-handed, but he uses an unorthodox southpaw baton technique that may have contributed to a few false or stuttering starts from the players. Musically, however, he proved a worthy right-hand man to Labadie (who will return to the helm in February 2016, the orchestra recently announced).

Rameau’s Suite from his late opera Les Boréades was stamped with all the hallmarks that have made Les Violons du Roy so dominant in the French Baroque repertoire: vivid articulation, limpid phrasing and easy grace. The lilting, pastoral second movement was lovingly rendered.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 is nicknamed the “Farewell”. It was written as a kind of work-to-rule protest against his patron, who had kept Haydn and his musicians at court for too long without a break. The last movement, in which the musicians silently walk off the stage one by one, was poignantly performed — the double bass solo was deeply melancholic and affecting. But it was in the strident first movement that the musicians shone; the smaller size of the orchestra meant Lussier could really lean into the syncopations and grinding dissonances.

Hamelin is known as a titanic interpreter of late Romantic and 20th-century showstoppers, but the beauty of his Mozart and Haydn shows the extraordinary versatility of his talents: supple, sensitive phrasing, dreamy legato and, always, that golden sound. If his runs in the Mozart A Major Rondo were a little thick and heavily pedalled for the hall, his playing in Haydn’s D Major Concerto was magnificent.

Hamelin’s approach to the Haydn was very different from Ingrid Fliter, who performed the work with NACO last week. Less fiery and intense, more playful and tender. Because he is so calm at the keyboard. Hamelin is sometimes accused of being aloof and cerebral, but at heart he is an old-school romantic. Who else could have chosen to play Wanda Landowska’s extraordinary cadenzas for the Haydn, and performed them so naturally?

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